Lots of Spark news this week, following last week’s Sparkalanche, plus some other non-Spark news just to show that Big Analytics isn’t entirely about Spark. Alteryx In IntelligentHQ, Maria Fonseca interviews Alteryx COO George Mathew, argues that analytics is for people. Left unanswered: who else it could be for. Analytic Startups Analytics vendor Ayasdi lands a $55 million “C” round.

Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics is out; for reference, the 2014 report is here; analysis from Doug Henschen here. Key changes from last year: Revolution Analytics moves from Visionary to Niche Alpine and Microsoft move from Niche to Visionary Oracle, Actuate and Megaputer drop out of the analysis Gartner changed its evaluation criteria this year to reflect only “native”

At the beginning of 2014, SAS EVP and CMO Jim Davis predicted double-digit revenue growth for 2014; in October, CEO Jim Goodnight walked that back to 5%, citing a challenging business climate in Europe. Today, SAS announced 2014 revenue of $3.09 Billion, up 2.3%. Meanwhile, IBM reported growth in analytics revenue of 7% in Q4. The challenge for SAS is that the US